Youtube stores lots of valuable information. I find myself searching Youtube more and more often. It’s an awesome way to enhance your research, check your competitors’ visual tactics and even manage your own product reputation.

For some reason, Youtube’s own search engine has always been somewhat lacking and while it has nice filters and supports handy search operators, it’s not quite usable. I have easier time to use Google to find videos on Youtube than using Youtube search itself.

Here are three tools to make more of Youtube search:

1. Geo Search Tool

Best for:

Online research (Filter results by location)

Reputation management research (Filter results by “Upload date”)

Geo Search Tool makes the life of a local business much easier: It lets you find videos “nearby”. It’s an invaluable tool for local reporting. Add your location and a keyword (in the “Advanced Search” section) and hit search: The results will also be mapped!

The tool aims at helping “find citizen journalism on YouTube“. It uses YouTube and Google APIs to generate location based search results which are stack ranked by upload time. Please note that only a small percentage of videos are geo-tagged and this search will only query those videos.

Playing with filters is actually addictive: You can set how far away from your location you want to search, how recent the video should be and what type of videos you are interested in (i.e. videos labeled for commercial reuse, Live videos and embeddable videos):

Creative Commons Only Results: This filter allows you to surface videos currently with a creative commons license. To learn more about the Creative Common license here.

Embeddable Only Results: This filter will only display videos that are enabled to be embedded. Learn more here

Live Only Results: This filter will only display live streams. Learn more here

You can use multiple variations of your keyword phrases using OR boolean operator.

You can use multiple variations of your brand name (one word, domain, social media moniker, etc) as one search string using commas.

You can play any video right within search results which saves plenty of time. And you can scroll through results quickly to get a full picture of what you are dealing with. The fact that it combines multiple search sessions on one page makes your search very efficient.

3. MYouTube (Google Chrome)

Best for: Anything

MYouTube is a handy Google Chrome extension that does a lot of things improving your Youtube productivity including instant control over volume by scrolling mouse wheel and “turn off lights” feature. When it comes to search, it lets you search Youtube while still watching a video, on the same page. It’s great for multi-tasking!

Basically, you can use Youtube’s search box and the results will appear to the right of the currently playing video. Nice!